Down East Latch Strings/Chapter 6
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hat route shall we take to Mount Desert?" was Baily’s question, in a general way, at breakfast on Tuesday morning.
"There are two or three ways overland," I explained, "or we can go by steamer. Which shall it be?"
"By the steamboat, of course," said our imperious lady-member with an air of astonishment over any possible indecision, "for our tickets read that way."
I departed forthwith to the office of the Portland, Mt. Desert and Machias Steamboat Company, and bought stateroom tickets for that evening's boat. It was to be the "City of Richmond." She would sail at 11 P.M., when the train leaving Boston at 7 o'clock arrived, and would reach Mt. Desert about noon on the next day, by a devious route through the beautiful islands of Penobscot bay.
The overland routes I had indicated were two: chiefly the Maine Central railroad, by the way of Bangor and Mt. Desert ferry; and, secondarily, the Maine Central and Knox and Lincoln railroads, by the way of Brunswick and Bath to Rockland, and thence by steamboat. The former of these is very popular with pleasure-seekers, while many take the Rockland route, either going or coming.
It was a very interesting coast we were passing all that restful night,—one identified with the very birth of New England, and as interesting for its scenery and geology, as for its history and present population. It is a coast gashed with deep fiords—long, irregular inlets of the ocean reaching up into the land and admitting vessels to the salt meadows and farmer's doors.
Into the largest of these fiords, empties the Kennebec, and on the most spacious of the ridgy promontories, at the eastern limit of Booth (the Kennebec's) bay, stood Pemaquid fortress. Its story is best told in Drake's Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast: "The Kennebec," says Drake, "was known to the French earlier than the English, and by its proper name. Champlain's voyage in the autumn of 1604, extended, it is believed, as far as Monhegan, as he names an isle ten leagues from 'Quinebeque,'…De Monts followed Champlain in 1605…visiting and observing the Kennebec, of which a straight-forward story is told. Even then, the river was known as a thoroughfare to Canada.
"The mouth of the Kennebec is interesting as the scene of the third attempt to obtain a foothold on New England's soil. This was the colony of Chief Justice Popham, which arrived off Monhegan in August, 1607."
This settlement, though well begun, proved a failure, and was abandoned in less than a year, though fifty houses within a fortification had been built, and a "prytty pynnace" framed and launched. This was the origin of Maine ship-building, the principal centres of which are still at Bath and Boothhay, in the same estuary.
There has been a tendency toward romancing as to the next half-century; but it appears that only a few families of white people inhabited the coast, engaged in fishing. A stockade existed on Pemaquid point, in 1630, and was rifled in 1632 by the freebooter, Dixy Bull; but previous to 1677, when Andros mounted five guns in his little Fort Charles, the place had not been of any account. This lasted until 1689, when it was destroyed by Indians. By this time, however, the strategic importance of this point had been impressed upon the minds of the Massachusetts colonists, and in 1692 the erection of Fort William Henry was begun by trained engineers. This became the strongest fortress in America at that date. It was of stone and earthworks, had a great round tower, and mounted fourteen guns, six of which were eighteen-pounders.
"The importance of Pemaquid, as a check to French aggression, was very great. It covered the approaches to the Kennebec, the Sheepscot, Damariscotta and Pemaquid rivers. It was, also, being at their doors, a standing menace against the Indian allies of the French, with a garrison ready to launch against their villages or intercept the advance of war parties toward the New England settlements.…On the other hand the remoteness of Pemaquid rendered it impracticable to relieve it when once invested by an enemy. Only a few feeble settlements skirted the coast between it and Casco bay, so the same causes combined to make it both weak and formidable. Old Pentagoët, which the reader knows for Castine, and Pemaquid, were the mailed hands of each nationality, always clinched, ready to strike." (Drake.)
French and Indians schemed together against it, and in 1696, the naval captains D'Iberville and Bonaventure, accompanied by 200 Indians in canoes, under St. Castin, sailed into the harbor and summoned the fort to surrender, which it speedily did. Plunder and massacre followed. Charlevoix gives an account of it, and the Indian story of the fight is detailed in Father Vetronuile's History of the Abnaki's. Two days were spent in demolishing the fortress, so well built but so ingloriously defended; and then the French departed.
The Indians, however, were allied to the French,—and I don’t blame them! The English voyagers and settlers uniformly outraged the natives, while the buoyant, adaptive French conciliated them. By 1730, however, the French wars were over, and on the ruins of the old fortress, Massachusetts erected at Pemaquid point a new one named Fort Frederick, the remains of which are yet plainly visible; but only fish-oil factories, and a few shore-people occupy the ground where, 250 years age, Dunbar laid out the squares of a great city-to-be.
The islands at the month of the Kennebec are fervidly recommended by a recent reporter, for reasons apart from antiquarian interest. "We shall find," is his promise, "the islands gleaming with white tents and parti-colored cottages, clean and neat hotels and boarding-houses, The two-hours' sail down the river, among the islands, without the least fear of sea-sickness, is a most delightful one. Do you enjoy deep-sea fishing, with never a care or thought of the pains and penalties of sea-sickness? Then this is the place to visit. Do you relish fresh fish, just drawn from the coolest depths of old ocean, and do you wish your fevered cheeks to be fanned by the sea-breezes in their purity? Then come here." A steamboat runs daily from Bath to these cooling-places for fevered cheeks.
Opposite Bath begins the track of the Knox and Lincoln Railroad that connects all the coast villages together, Its scenery is a rapid alternation of hills and waves, seaports and farm hamlets. The tidal rivers swirl about the rocks, or wander lazily among black-edged flatlands, their waters here lost in the maze of a fish-trap made of brush, and intricate enough to puzzle a fox, there hidden in the jetty shadow of some tall-limbed, broken-backed bridge which goes straddling across the muddy flats as if on stilts. Then the traveler rushes through a deep trench in the rocks; whisks by a sunny road, where, perhaps, a farmer stands leaning indolently on the neck of one of his oxen; or is charmed by the sight of some still pond, blue as the sky, whose granite shores are bordered with the gay decoration of raspberry, vaccinium, and woodbine, quick to feel the autumn.
Wiscasset (scene of One Summer); Damariscotta (the station for New Castle and Pemaquid, and renowned for the immense Indian shell-heaps described in Ingersoll's Oyster Industries of the United States); and Thomaston (the former home of the lordly Knox, soldier of the Revolution, and patron-saint of this part of the world), are passed in quick succession,—each a storehouse of entertaining legend, enchanting scenery, health and sport. Finally the Penobscot mouth comes into sight and Rockland is reached.
Rockland and its vicinity are devoted to the quarrying of the peculiar lime-rock, which, when calcined, becomes "Portland" cement. There are nearly 100 kilns, which make a million and a half barrels of hydraulic lime every year; and on a dark night, when these great kilns are blazing in all directions, the river-banks and outskirts of the town present a strange and somewhat infernal appearance.
As a village, Rockland is not unlike any of the other coast villages, but its surroundings are a delightful combination of hill and coast scenery. This is attracting the attention of people who are in search of agreeable summering places, for they find here a variety of pleasure and a bracing climate within easy reach of the business and social world. The shores of Penobscot bay, not only, but the whole western half of this cool, rocky, picturesque, historic, old shore-line of Maine, is rapidly being appropriated to the genial purposes of midsummer recreation. Camden and Belfast, above Rockland, are favorite localities.
For a large part of this coast, in both directions, Rockland is the supply point. The islands near town sustain quarries of a fine-grained gray granite, greatly in demand as building stone. "Dix island is a vast mass of granite where the vessels load directly from the sides of the ledges. It furnished the stone for the New York and Philadelphia post-offices, and the huge monolithic columns for the United States treasury at Washington. "The Bodwell company at Vinal Haven and Sprucehead, furnished the material for the new government buildings at Cincinnati, and the state, war and navy departments at Washington." Rockland now has direct communication by railroad and steamers with Portland, Bangor, and all the adjacent landings; and it possesses at least one good hotel.
I was in no haste to get up that morning, as early as I was urged to do; and when finally I reached the deck, whither my room-mate had preceded me, the boat had already been made fast to the wharf at Rockland, and the port rail was lined with passengers, while others were coming aboard, all fresh and loquacious.
Baily and Prue were full of enthusiasm, but otherwise, apparently, an aching void, for "breakfast! breakfast!!" was all the word I could get out of either of them. I wasn’t so indecently ravenous as this, though the nipping salt air was fast stimulating appetite, and I made some sharp remark intended to rebuke these two youngsters for their lack of patience and dignity.
"Well, what of it!" was Prue’s retort,—there is a certain person to whom she is not always as duly respectful as I could wish,—"'Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?' No wonder you’re not hungry,—you haven't been on a sea voyage, like us."
"And where, then, your majesty, have I been?"
"You've just been sound asleep!"
Manifestly it was idle to argue anything with a young woman who would look you straight in the eye and say such a thing as that. I therefore wasted no reply, but turned my attention to the shore.
The sun was just rising. The foreground of high-perched warehouses and wharves, lifted far above the fallen tide, where craft, large and small, trim and slovenly, were moored upon the smooth water, had hardly yet rid itself of the lurking shadows of night; and the clustered roofs and spires of the city were only half revealed in the still, gray light. Behind the town, the jagged masses of the Camden hills rose dark against the flushed sky, where, as we looked, they were suddenly veiled in silver mist, which lifted them into a sort of mirage of reflected white light, wonderful to behold. Then as we left the wharves behind and crept out into the bay, this gauzy veil was shot through and through with threads of gold, beyond which every pinnacle became sharply defined, then rimmed with molten gold, then fused in the ineffable blaze and glory of the sunrise, as the orb of light came slowly above Megunticook, and bid the world give worship.
"Look!" I cried. "Behold with what pomp—"
"Do you think if will be long?" said my wile, plaintively,—she was gazing toward the cabin, not into "the purple window of the east."
"What will be long?" I asked with some impatience at this stolid interruption.
"Why, to wait for breakfast. Talk not to me of the sun’s bright rays till I've had my coffee! Then you shall see that my soul will glow with—"
I never heard what it would "glow with," for a gong sounded afar off, and faintly, yet we heard it, and fled as one man.
Half an hour later we were prepared to enjoy the devious channel into Castine.
"The voyager approaching these shores," wrote Mr. Noah Brooks, whose boyhood was spent upon them, "beholds a wonderful panorama of sea and land. The bay of the Penobscot is studded with unnumbered islands. These are covered, for the most part, with fir, spruce and larch. The shores are bold and rocky, and rich tones of brown, gray and purple, are reflected in the silvery tide. Far up the Penobscot, as one rounds the eastern end of Long island, stretches a lovely vista of tender blue, melting into more positive hues in the middle distance where old Fort Point, once Fort Pownal, stands like a sentinel at the entrance to the river. To the right and eastward, the bluffy and well-wooded extremity of the peninsula of ancient Pentagoët dominates the scene, its light-house marking, like a white finger, the highest point of that section of the shore. To the right of the light-house opens another vista where the Bagaduce, with the shores of Brooksville mirrored in its tide, leads the eye up into a tangle of hills and dales, over which rises the azure peak of Blue hill. Still farther to the eastward, over the hills. and resting like a cloud on the horizon, are the heroic lines of the ridges of Mount Desert."
"It's a little one," remarked Baily, casting his eye over the peninsula before us, "but it has grown more romance to the acre than any other in Maine. It seems like going back a good ways in this new world, when an American can connect his local history with the machinations of the great Cardinal Richelieu."
"Can Castine do that?"
"Yes. The Plymouth colony had set up a trading post here, called Pentagoët, as early as 1629. But Louis XIII. and Richelieu, Razilly and the rest of the French masters, thought English aggression toward Acadia better be nipped in the bud, and so sent a fleet under D’Aulnay de Charnisay to oust the Pilgrims and setup a French station. Having succeeded (1635), to him was given control of all that is now Maine, while east of the St. Croix the French crown was represented by Charles St. Estienne, Lord of La Tour, another titled cut-throat. Both of 'em were sent out here, I fancy, because too ungovernable to remain comfortably at home.
"Having nobody else to fight they pitched into one another on the score of religion,—a fragment of the bloody contest of Jesuit versus Huguenot which convulsed and was presently to decimate France; for D'Aulnay was a Roman Catholic, while La Tour was a Protestant; here was material for 'a very pretty quarrel,; and they utilized it to the full. The Indians not only, but the Massachusetts colonists were dragged into the feud, and battles by sea and land, sieges and counter-sieges Gin one of which Miles Standish figures), marked year after year with bloody incidents. Through all, stands the figure of Madame La Tour,—sharp, expedient, courageous, saucy—a worthy mate for such a man. Finally, in 1643, La Tour, having left his fort on the St. John imperfectly guarded, while he went off on a cruise to Boston, D'Aulnay suprised it, took ten thousand dollars worth of plunder, and brought La Tour's wife to Pentagoët as a prisoner. That is the subject of Whittier's fine poem St. John. The Puritans of Boston of course favored the Huguenot, loading his vessel with the supplies he so sorely needed, whereupon he hastened homeward to find his fortress overthrown and his colony in ashes. A priest is there to tell him the story."
And opening his Whittier, Baily read to us, grandly:—
"How terrible!: Prue exclaims.
"Yes,—terrible. It killed the proud-spirited captive, after a very few weeks, and a little later D'Aulnay himself died. Then followed the most curious part of this whole history, that somehow seems farther away than the struggles of Rome and Carthage—La Tour reappeared and married Madame D'Aulnay!"
Castine does not look out upon the river, but is some distance back from "the point," where Dice’s Head light-house sheds its rays upon the intricate channels; and it faces a snug little harbor within the mouth of Bagaduce river. Those who have read Noah Brook's finely illustrated article, An Old Town with a History, in The Century for September, 1882, need no account of this harbor, nor of the picturesque water-front of the antique town. But Castine is by no means superannuated. It has large and living interests in ship-building, deep-sea-fisheries and the canning industries, and among its residents are many wealthy men, while more than one distinguished name occurs in its modern annals.
"Faint traces of St. Castin's fort are seen, and on the hill behind the village the English Fort St. George is well preserved. The remains of various American batteries and field-works are found on the peninsula, while the harbor is commanded by a neat little fort recently erected by the United States. Castine is a favorite summer resort, by reason of its seclusion, its heroic memories, its fine boating and fishing facilities, and the salubrity of its sea-breezes."
Its modern name recalls one of the most romantic figures among all the knightly Frenchmen of two centuries ago, who seem so out of place on these wild shores. In 1667 Vincent, Baron de St. Castin, a man of education and high breeding, formely colonel of the Royal Carrignan regiment, came to the Penobscot trading-post from Quebec, married one or more daughters of Modocowando, chief of the warrior-bred Abnakis—whose just hatred of the English dated from the day when, in 1605, Weymouth kidnapped some of their people at Pemaquid,—and became a sort of demigod among all the Indians. During thirty years, with only a few scattered and distant priests for intelligent neighbors, he made Pentagoët his home, building there just such a four-bastioned stockade as I have seen again and again at posts of the Hudson's Bay company in the far northwest.
The English, covetous of its value and fearful of its influence, attacked the trading-post time and again, and here was kindled the spark which lit the wide-spreading flame of King William's war. St. Castin not only defended his own, but sailed with Iberville against the Massachusetts fort at Pemaquid and destroyed it by the aid of his Indians. After the Nova Scotia campaigns of 1706-7 lie seems to have returned to his lame in the Pyrenees, leaving his son (by the Abnaki princess) to become the sagamo of the Penobscot tribes, ruling them in peace and with nobility until 1720, when he was led prisoner to Boston. The next year he went to France, and claimed his father's estates. Though lineal descendants of Vincent St. Castin have been chiefs of the Abnakis ever since, Whittier seems to have taken much poetic license with dates, when, in Mogg Megone, he makes Castin a contemporary of the destruction of Norridgewock,
"No matter," cries Prue, her eyes flashing. "What a fine picture we get of the chivalrous old soldier—
With the close of Indian warfare settlements sprang up all along the coast and on the rivers; and in 1779 England thought it worth while to seize Castine, and build a fort there (Ft. St. George) against the rebels, the remains of which, on the hill-top above the village, furnish one of the best preserved relics of that period in New England.
Massachusetts at once sent against it a large fleet, carrying 344 cannon, and 2,000 soldiers. They spent several days in bombarding, but finally effected a landing, and would doubtless have reduced the fort, had not seven British frigates suddenly appeared in the river, and attacked the Americans. Never was rout so complete. After one broadside, the American line was broken and a helter-skelter flight ensued on sea and land. Every vessel of the fleet was destroyed.
"I believe Paul Revere was one of the runaway Yankees in that engagement," remarks our member—our malicious member—from Manhattan.
"Yes; and the poet's grandfather, Peleg Wadsworth, was second in command; but Longfellow didn't seem to regard that incident as a good sort of thing to celebrate in his hero of the 'midnight ride.' Old Peleg himself, a little later, was captured and confined in the fort here, whence he and a companion made their escape through an adventure which forms one of the most thrilling traditions of the war. Another participant in the same fight has been sung about,—a British officer who became that Sir John Moore, of Corunna, who, in death,
Leaving the little harbor, whose green hills have echoed to the cannon of five naval battles, we steered eastward into the river-like Eggemoggin Reach, which separates the archipelago from the mainland by a straight channel a dozen miles in length. The shores are bold and irregular, farms sloping back to the uplands and alternating with rocky and forested promontories. At the lead of one of the indentations into the mainland, stands Sedgwick, and nearly opposite, the northern landing on Deer Isle. This, and the adjacent islands, form a township which contains about 3,500 regular inhabitants, all of whom are more or less dependant upon the sea for their living. The recent changes which have come about in the abundance and distribution of deep-sea food-fishes, and the methods of catching them, have been more unfortunate for the dwellers on this line of coast than anywhere else; and had not the people welcomed the "summer boarder," who at this opportune moment began to find out what grand possibilities of pleasure awaited him there, it would have gone hard with the native population. The last blow to their industries was the disappearance of the menhaden, or pogies, which now cannot be caught north of Cape Cod, though a few years ago the annual catch was 100,000,000. On Deer Isle may be seen one local custom more conspicuous than graceful; this is scores of women and girls, their skirts trussed up and stowed away in an enormous pair of oilskin trousers, such as the fishermen wear, and their feet bare or lost in rubber boots, busily digging clams on certain wide mud-flats. In Harper's Magazine for August and September, 1880, appeared two illustrated articles entitled Fish and Men in the Maine Islands, which deal with this interesting part of the coast.
The course, after Naskeag point has been passed and the Reach is escaped, winds among green islands, of every size and shape—some rising high and peaked, others low and bare, or mere reefs, or masses of dark forest. There were so many of them that they sometimes completely slit off the view on all sides. Then a vista would open out to sea, and we could feel the steamer swing easily upon the long swell coming in from the Atlantic; or through an opposite gateway our sight might reach across a wide area of placid water and rugged shore northward, to where Blue hill, 1,000 feet high, reared its faithful landmark. "Far before us, on the right, rose the blue summit of Isle au Haunt, as the early French navigators named it—a mountain rising from the waves. Before us the peaks of Mount Desert came gradually into view, at first misty and blue, then green and wooded, until as we advanced, still loftier summits showed themselves in grim and stony desolation."
Another and shorter route between Rockland and Mount Desert may be taken by steamers following a more outside course than we pursued, stopping at landings in North Haven, Vinal Haven, to Deer Isle (Green’s Landing) where boats can always be engaged to go to Isle au Haut. Isle au Haut can also be reached by a regular steamer from Bar Harbor.
The Blue Hill Steamboat Company also sends boats to and fro among the islands by several devious routes between Rockland, Blue Hill and the many villages. There is no lack of means, therefore, for getting promptly to almost any one of the islands or mainland landings all over this amphibious region.